The health care community has recognized in recent years the importance of preventive care in managing patients' health. Preventive care is particularly important in managing the health of patients having chronic diseases or long-term conditions. Preventive care includes educating patients about their disease, ensuring communication between patients and health care providers (e.g. doctors), and providing patients with tools and/or treatments for managing their disease.
Commonly used preventive care approaches suffer from several drawbacks. Much of health care is voluntary, and thus a large fraction of health care resources is typically spent on patients who are actively seek involvement in their care. A large number of patients do not actively seek information and treatment in the absence of symptoms, however. Also, health providers receive very little information on whether patients are complying with preventive care guidelines. Thus, health providers often are not able to take remedial steps before the disease affects the patients symptomatically (e.g. through pain). Reaching passive patients is thus critical to delivering effective preventive care.
The mass-marketing techniques used for health education by most health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and insurance companies allow little customization of information to an individual patient's needs. Consequently, many patients may not directly identify with the educational approaches used by their health providers. Personalizing health education would significantly raise the effectiveness of preventive care, especially in children and adolescents.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,549,117 to describes a system for communicating health information between health providers and patients having a chronic disease such as asthma. A patient unit displays health information, and communicates health information between the patient and a health provider. The display is relatively impersonal, however.